


The Invention of Heaven

by AVegetarianCannibal



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: But maybe not, Death, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Quantum Mechanics, Science, the Nature of Reality, the afterlife, twotlversary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-28 22:53:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20433794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AVegetarianCannibal/pseuds/AVegetarianCannibal
Summary: They fall.





	The Invention of Heaven

Will has been falling for a while now. Probably for longer than he thinks. At some point he becomes aware that he can no longer hear the waves clawing at the rocks or the battering of the wind that seemed so loud when he first began falling.

Instead he hears the scratch of his own beard against Hannibal's sweater and slowly realizes he can feel it, too. He also feels Hannibal's arms around his waist and a voice whispering, "Hold tight... hold tight... Wherever you go, I go."

He falls, with Hannibal, for a while longer.

He falls for so long that direction becomes meaningless. It's like touching water so hot that it feels cold. His own senses are no use to him. Maybe he's actually been rising this whole time.

"Are we going to hit the water or the clouds?" he asks.

"Clouds _are _water," Hannibal says. "Everything is the same as everything else."

Either he stops falling or he becomes so familiar with it that it's just like any other state of being now. Everything is the same as everything else.

He finally looks up into Hannibal's eyes. The expression there is so very fond. He doesn't seem mad in the least.

"I think I've killed us both," Will says.

Hannibal smiles, "Thankfully it wasn't just one of us, I suppose."

Will takes the smallest step back. If he's not on solid ground, he's at least stable. Wherever he is, Hannibal is in orbit with him, or something like it. Gravitationally locked.

He trails his hand through his surroundings. He thinks it might be moonlight. The same light of the full moon that illuminated their battle with the Dragon, but more viscous in some way that Will can't describe. 

"If light were sea foam," Hannibal says, finding the words for him.

"There's still blood on your sweater," Will says, nodding towards the wound in Hannibal's middle. "Does it hurt? Where he shot you?"

Hannibal presses a hand to the spot and raises his brows, curious. "Not a bit. There is sensation."

"But not pain," Will says, reaching up to touch his own cheek. "I felt as if we were falling for an eternity."

"One could argue we spend our entire lives falling," Hannibal says. "Never truly reaching the end, but instead dividing in half the distance between ourselves and what we're falling towards, infinitely. A centimeter... half a centimeter... ten molecules of air, five... down to the fundamental energy strings that make up the universe."

"Philosophizing even in death, if indeed we are dead," Will says. He laughs but then a thought occurs to him that fills him with regret. "If we never land, then we can never truly touch, either. Some fundamental particle... some _string_ will always be a buffer between us."

"What if we haven't died yet," Hannibal asks. "What if we have become conscious of the halving of every moment that exists between our fall from the bluff to our drop into the Atlantic?"

Will thinks about what Hannibal said moments or eons ago. "Then there are an infinity of moments."

"Our afterlife, out of chronological order," Hannibal says.

Will holds up his hand and Hannibal does the same. Their fingers move within subatomic particles of each other and then, like the foam of time that surrounds them, begin to become something perceptible on a level neither of ever could have imagine. The atoms of their hands, on such a scale, are able to mingle together. Their flesh isn't flesh but the buzzing of energy that only seems solid. 

"We have become conjoined," Hannibal says, or maybe Will says it. Perhaps they say it together.

Will takes his hand back so he can touch Hannibal's face down to the molecules that dip and sway to form the lovely lines in his skin. 

They lean simultaneously into a kiss that feels like any kiss but also like something that makes up whatever underlies the universe. Will tastes both his blood and Hannibal's, more than iron and salt, more than quarks and other mysteries.

"You were wrong," Will says, maybe without even breaking the kiss. "Everything isn't the same as everything else. This..."

"This is something new," Hannibal says, as they fall and fall... and fall.

**Author's Note:**

> for byk23


End file.
